You may have seen this before on “another” web site, but since the topic of inspection engines has come up here, I thought I’d share this with you.
I had a nice Bachmann 4-4-0 wood-burner that didn’t really fit the general concept of operations for my railroad that I, nevertheless, wanted to use somehow. I also had a Bachmann 1:22.5 coach kit laying around that I didn’t really need either, so I decided to have some fun with the two.
Now, inspection locos were used on standard gauge railroads all the time but, as far as I know, there never was such a thing on a narrow gauge RR. However, since I have never been a slave to prototype, I decided my 1:20.3 scale railroad would have one. Here’s the result:
First, the “official” builder’s photos:
Some quarter shots…
Going away…
and head on.
The toughest part of the project was building the front boarding steps. I would have liked to create curved, sweeping, wrought-iron staircases on either side of the pilot beam but I just didn’t have the space or the necessary skill to do so. These were built up from sheet styrene and brass rod.
Here are some shots of the electronic “guts” of the thing. The coal pile is removable to allow access to the stuff in the tender. Those are the on/off switch and the charging jack in the water-fill trunk. I found that because the tender is made entirely of plastic, I could leave the antenna laying flat inside without loss of range.
The model is powered by a 14.8 vdc lithium-ion battery pack from Batteryspace.com (the big green thing on the left side) and controlled by an AirWire 9000 receiver/decoder. Believe it or not, there’s also a Phoenix P-5 sound unit and 3" speaker in there as well as a programming jack and volume switch.
The coach body provides lots of room inside the cab…
The passenger figures are from Preiser, who produce some very nice figures in several scales. Many of them are American turn-of-the-century types. They are done in 1:22.5 scale, which makes them a bit small for Fn3 (1:20.3), but that’s what allowed me to fit these guys in the tight space I had. I guess that kinda explains why narrow gauge railroads didn’t have inspection engines like this - they just weren’t big enough. Here is a shot of a couple of them on my workbench and some close-ups of them in the inspection engine itself:
On the rear deck of the tender, I added a handle to the tool box, scratch built a working cut lever for the Acccucraft coupler, and added a break line hose and “gladhand.”
On the upper deck, I added a coal-retaining bulkhead, a larger water-fill trunk (for the on/off switch and the charging jack,) and, of course, a rear arc-type lamp.
The air compressor was relocated outside to just aft of the engineer’s side rear driver (can’t be disturbing all those VIPs in the cabin, y’know - not to mention suffocating them.)
I added a brake system and fenders for the drivers and additional air tanks on both sides.
The Stephenson valve gear is pretty much stock - just repainted.
The stock whistle and pop valves were extended up through the roof.
As John did in the first posting in this string, I had lots of fun building this “Flight o’ Fancy” and I hope you all had some fun looking at it as well.
